News

July 19, 2013

Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics Associate Professor Yi-Tao Yu, Ph.D. was a co-corresponding author on a paper recently published in Nature. This work presented a novel and completely unexpected codon-anticodon base-pairing interaction in the ribosomal decoding center during translation. This work provided a molecular basis for the decoding of a nonsense codon by the ribosome.

The research was carried out in collaboration with the Venki Ramakrishnan lab at MRC in Cambridge, UK. Dr. Ramakrishnan won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (along with Thomas Steitz and Ada Yonath) for his pioneering work on the structure and function of ribosome. Dr. Ramakrishnan will be visiting U of R in October.

June 15, 2011

In a new study published today in the journal Nature, scientists discovered an entirely new way to change the genetic code. The findings, though early, are significant because they may ultimately help researchers alter the course of devastating genetic disorders, such as cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and many forms of cancer.

The ability to manipulate the production of a protein from a particular gene is the new miracle of modern medicine, said Robert Bambara, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of Rochester Medical Center. This is a really powerful concept that can be used to try to suppress the tendency of individuals to get certain debilitating, and sometimes fatal genetic diseases that will forever change their lives.

This is a very exciting finding, said Yi-Tao Yu, Ph.D., lead study author and associate professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the Medical Center. No one ever imagined that you could alter a stop codon the way we have and allow translation to continue uninterrupted like it was never there in the first place.